To media art curator and critic Ida Hiršenfelder, Antoine Schmitt’s art and his project Time Slip ask us: nowadays, who can divide the virtual from the real?
Time Slip is a LED news ticker operating in real time: a computer software transcribes official online news released by news agencies, changing the past tense to the future tense. In doing this, it constructs an ambiguous relation between the present, the past and the potential. Time Slip is about the relation between cause, effect, randomness and free will: reading news about facts that have already happened disallows the audience’s ability to be active about them; whereas, oppositely, reading news about the future raises anxiety and shows how the mass media proceed to produce submissive citizens, as opposed to informing them.
Antoine Schmitt, a French installation and digital artist, is first of all an engineer and a programmer who began his career in IT during the 80s.